Sunday, June 1, 2014

Reviews #126-130: early Favorites of 2014

We’re trying a new approach today!We’ve read tons of 2014 titles already this year. (Of course there are many more yet to see.) Out of those that have crossed our paths so far in the first half of the year, here are some favorites, all in one post! The kids are each going to pick one of the books to highlight...

Dad: Evie, why don’t you get us started.What is your favorite book of the year so far?Evangeline (age 6): I like the pictures in this book.I like how it’s 3D!

Dad: This is “Jim Curious” by Matthias Picard.

Elijah (age 8): Oh my gosh.This book is so cool.

Isaac (age 15): Dude.It’s
amazing.

Gracie (age 13):Anything we say is not going to do it justice.

Evangeline: I need the goggles. (Puts on the 3D glasses)Woah, it’s so cool!!!

Dad: So tell everyone what it’s like to read a 3D book…

Evangeline: The glasses make it look like this fish is swimming
towards you.It comes closer to you. The
fish is coming out at my face!Oh my
word, can I touch this?I want to stick
my hand right under the fish… but it’s not working.

Lily (age 11): Woah!Woah!I keep trying to reach out to grab it.

Dad: What is the story about?

Evangeline: It is about “under the sea.”This guy is swimming.

Lily: The pages have a lot of action. It’s like a movie.

Isaac: It’s a visual spectacle. The art would still be cool even
if it wasn’t 3D.

Evangeline: It looks like you can try to stick your head into the
pictures.Like I can go under this water
and swim with this person and look at this cool stuff.For real.Gracie:It feels like you shouldn’t be able to turn the pages – because it looks
more like staring into a shadow box than a book.

Evangeline: But when you take the glasses off, it looks plain.

Dad: Then when you put the glasses back on...

Evangeline: KAPOW!

Dad: Ka-pow! Kapoof!

Evangeline: Not kapoof.Only
kapow.Kapoof sounds weird.

Dad: How would you feel if we ever lost the glasses?

Evangeline: I’d be, like, (voice
trembling) "I want to stick my hand under the fish, but now I can't!"

Gracie:I would cry.

Evangeline: Only the first half of this book is my favorite
book.At the end there is an underwater
tornado.And it makes me feel like, "Oh
cwap.This tornado is going to make me
go into it."

Dad: Cwap?Can we say ‘cwap’ on Bookie Woogie?

Evangeline: Yeah.

Dad: I’ve never heard you say ‘cwap’ before.

Evangeline: "Cwap."

Dad: Now I’ve heard you say it twice.Let’s wash your mouth out with some of this
3D water.

Elijah: One of the dinosaurs said it was the fastest.One of them said it was the biggest.One of them said ‘I’ve got armored
plates.’They all thought they were the
best.But I don’t know who was right.

Dad: How did you do with reading all these dinosaur names?

Elijah:Heheheheheh…That’s the tricky part.

Dad: Why don’t scientists just name dinos things like Bob… and
Ed… and Poofer.

Elijah: Poofer?

Dad: I don’t know.It’s
better than… Leaellynasura.

Elijah:All dinosaurs are named weird things.Like, Spinosaurus.Actually that’s the easiest name of all of
them.

Gracie:I saw that guy on Jurassic Park… that was freaky.

Lily:(reading names beneath the pictures) "Oviraptor..." Gasp!It’s a chicken-lion-dragon!You know those chicken-lion-dragon things?Cockatrice!Maybe that’s where they got the cockatrice myth from.Gasp!That makes so much sense.

Evangeline: I don’t like dinosaurs. Every night I think about dinosaurs.

Dad: Every night?I
didn’t know that.

Evangeline: Yeah.At night I
think their heads are going to open and eat me.But I do think it would be fun to ride a baby dinosaur.

Dad: Elijah, would you like to have a dinosaur for a pet?

Elijah: That probably would not be a good idea.

Gracie:I don’t want
him to have one.

Elijah: I’d accidentally kill everyone with it.

Gracie:Elijah walks around with a stuffed alligator, beaning
people in the head.Imagine what he
would do with a real live predator at his disposal.That would be horrific.

Isaac: This book has very detailed art.The illustrator has a very cool style - you
can still see the pencil beneath the paint.

Dad: This illustrator is one of my favorites.As soon as I saw that he’d been tapped to do
a book about dinosaurs, I thought, That
is BRILLIANT!Why has that never
happened before?Gennady Spirin.Dinosaurs.Of course someone needs to put them together. It’s awesome.

Elijah:(singing to the
tune of a Frozen song) Gennady and
dinos… they’re both so intense… put them together… it just makes sense!Rat da dat, da da dada da doo...

Dad: Okay, Lily, pick a book!

Lily (age 11): “Oliver’s Tree.”

Dad: By Kit Chase.

Gracie:This one is really cute.

Lily: Oliver is an elephant, and he was playing with his
friends, a bunny and an owl.Oliver saw
his friend in a tree, but he was too big to climb up with her.So they try to find a tree that Oliver can
climb.One had bigger branches, but it
was too high.One was too small.They found a perfect tree, but when he got in
it, the branch broke.

Dad: Poor guy.

Lily: It’s so sad -- he just fell on his face.So Oliver sat on a tree stump and went
to sleep.Then his friends built a tree
house around him, and when he woke up -- POOF!A tree house.

Kids: (singing to the
tune of a Frozen song) Do you wanna build a tree house…

Lily: I would totally live in a tree house if I could.Yeah.If it was big enough. And if it
had electricity. Except for bugs… I
wouldn’t like termites.

Dad: Do you like climbing trees too?

Lily: Oh my gosh.I LOVE
climbing trees.

Elijah: I do.I’m just not
good at it unless there’s a low branch to start with.I’m not very tall.

Lily: I miss that climbing tree at our old house.I remember when our neighbor Gina came over,
we would climb it.And we would pretend
we were cheetahs.Okay that part was
weird.

Dad: How about the illustrations in this book?

Gracie:Everything about this book is adorable.Really cute.

Isaac: I have nothing against cute things.People who do are kind of sad.I like “cute” -- I’m a happy person.

Evangeline: I like the owl best.Owls are my favorite animal.If I
ever meet the person who made this book, I would like her very much.I would want her to draw me 100 owls.I would want her to make me a tattoo of an
owl.

Dad: Gracie!What’s
your favorite book?

Gracie (age 13):“Sparky” by Jenny
Offill and Chris Appelhans.I really do like
the storyline a lot, but the pictures – the pictures are so, so cool.

Elijah: Everybody likes this book.

Gracie:Sparky is a
sloth.This girl wants a pet, but her
mom says she has to get one that doesn’t need to be walked or fed or given a
bath.So she was like, “I’ll get a
sloth.”And she seems to love him... even
though he can’t do anything.

Elijah: I’d rather have a pet fox.

Gracie:She tries to play games with him, but he doesn’t
move.The sloth is... a dud.

Dad: Yeah… 'cause you have a flat head, and a big dark nose,
and you lay around…

Lily: NOOOOO… the GIRL.Ha haha
ha…

Dad:Ha ha... oh, the
girl, you say?

Gracie:The girl is adorable.You can totally see she’s fun and spunky.But the sloth just… fails.Fails.He doesn’t do anything.And the
book has no resolution to it at all.The
end scene is the girl, just sitting, sad in a tree, trying to play tag with a sloth.

Dad: You think she’s sad?Her face is turned away from us.

Gracie:I don’t know.

Dad: Or is she happy to accept him as he is?The sloth
looks happy there.

Gracie:It is!You can try
to really impress people, but it doesn’t always work out, and sometimes you
just have to accept that.And that’s
exactly what happened with the sloth.

Dad: Alright, Isaac.Give us another one.

Isaac (age 15): “Rules of Summer.”

Gracie:Oh, we love Shaun Tan.

Isaac: I like Shaun Tan’s work a lot.Everything he does is cool. He could do realistic work, but he chooses to
make it crazy, just for fun.And I like
that.I’m attracted to the randomness.

Dad: What’s the book about?

Isaac: It’s about these two brothers.The little boy is probably the main
character, but they are both very important.It takes place in this crazy world where anything happens.

Elijah: I was like, “What is happening?What.What.What.I don’t know what is going on.”

Lily: Like, where the heck did they get a
steamboat-rocketship-car-thing?And a
giant red rabbit?

Evangeline: That is a humungous bunny.

Isaac: There are random rules set to the awesome pictures.

Lily: So, don’t leave a red sock on a clothesline… or a giant
red rabbit will magically appear?

Dad: See, it’s a good thing you read it here first.You don’t want to learn that rule the hard
way.

Gracie:I want to go to that park with the magic glowing trees.

Isaac: My favorite picture is the kids standing on these water
tower things with really long nets, and they are trying to catch the stars in a
meteor shower.

Evangeline: They look like sky jellyfish!

Isaac: The pictures seem random, but by the end they tell a
story.

Dad: And what do you think the story is?

Isaac: The little boy is making lots of mistakes...

Evangeline: He drops all the stuff.I don’t like how he disobeys all the rules in this book!

Isaac: He feels sad about it, the brothers get in a fight, the
little boy get's trapped and goes away, his brother comes along with bolt cutters and saves him.Then they are happy and it all resolves.

Dad: Did you notice the crows?I read this book a ton of times before I noticed the crow on each page.

Isaac: I did notice actually. I didn’t realize it was on every page.But I noticed it.At first I thought they were representing “anger.”Now I’m not sure.It’s more “sad.”Like an angry… sad... remorse-ish
feeling.A down-low feeling.

Dad: Here’s my thought.I think they represent memories.The kid screws up and a crow is watching.The kid screws up and a crow is
watching.Over and over.

Isaac: But why are there lots of crow at the end then?

Dad: Because each time it’s a different crow.And all the memories are building. The crows are keeping track, keeping record of
all the mistakes, like "strikes," building up, and there’s this big weight of guilt growing.And eventually it destroys their relationship
-- it separates them.He’s swarmed by
all the negatives he’s done.Then the
brother comes along and forgives him.Forgiveness sets him free.And
after that, there’s no more crows.

Gracie:Guys… pick up your feet.It’s getting deep in here.

Lily: Gracie, I’m never fighting with you again!

Dad: So think of someone in the family you might have problems
with… What if you keep score and let disapproval build and build?

Gracie:Then you’re just going to have a house full of crows.

Lily: All that guilt.

Dad: And what fixes it?

Gracie:Bolt cutters.

Dad: Which represented…

Gracie:Bolt cutters.

Dad: Or…

Lily: Forgiveness!!!I
get angry at people, but it only lasts like 5 seconds.

Dad: So you are very quick to pull out the bolt cutters.

Lily: Yes.

Dad: Forgiveness is wonderful.

Isaac: You need to let it go.

Gracie and Lily: (singing to
the tune of the Frozen song)Let it
go… let it go… Getting rid of all my crows!Let it go…Let it go… Let
forgiveness grow…

About Us

Z-KIDS

We love the written word. We love art. Children's books are a place where those two things come together beautifully. Here at Bookie Woogie we pick our favorite books, review them, and create some accompanying fan art. We invite you to participate too: please chime in with your thoughts and comments!